1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates generally to polynucleotide structures, such as nucleic acid ribbons and nucleic acid tubes; methods for making those polynucleotide structures; and methods of building two-dimensional/three-dimensional objects using the nucleic acid ribbons and tubes.
2. Description of the Related Art
DNA has been proposed to be a suitable construction material to build synthetic lattices that template proteins into periodic arrays for crystallization. The idea for assembling synthetic DNA structures includes: encoding sequence complementarity in synthetic DNA strands in a suitable fashion such that by pairing up the complementary segments, DNA strands self-organize into a prescribed structure. A number of DNA structures have been created, such as ribbons, tubes, lattices, arbitrary 2D and 3D shapes. See, e.g., Seeman, Nature 421:427-431 (2003); Feldkamp & Niemeyer, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 45:1856-1876 (2006). Besides static structures, dynamic structures that compute, move, and grow have also been demonstrated. Seeman; Feldkamp & Niemeyer; Bath & Turberfield, Nature Nanotechnology 2:275-284(2007). Additionally, synthetic DNA/RNA structures and devices have been used to direct material arrangements (e.g., proteins (Yan et al., Science 301(5641):1882-1884 (2003)), gold nanoparticles (Le et al., Nano Lett., 4:2343-2347 (2004)), quantum dots (Sharma et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 47:5157-5159 (2008), and carbon nanotubes (Chen et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 129 (2007))) and to facilitate NMR protein structure determination (Douglas et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 104, 6644-6648 (2007)). Synthetic DNA/RNA structures are also thought to be useful in probing and manipulating cellular processes for bioimaging and therapeutic applications.